"Brent has put the Syllable User's Bible (SUB) back online, hosted on Syllable.org. Feel free to check it out, and email Brent with improvement suggestions. SUB's design hasn't been integrated into the main Syllable.org design yet."

No. Syllable is a fork of the AtheOS operating system, originally written by Kurt Skauen. Kurt never intended to copy the BeOS API, in fact AtheOS development started before the first BeBox was shipped. The BeOS API is undoubtedly a good design though. The Syllable API does use a lot of good ideas from the BeOS API, but we also design and add our own classes.

If you look at the core Syllable (AtheOS) API, and the BeAPI, the two are almost identical. Right down to the OS::Message BMessage link. AtheOS had OS::Window (BWindow), OS::View (BView), an AppServer (ditto) and a OO Message passing mechanism identical to BeOS. None of this, despite Kurt's protests, happened without Kurt reading up on the BeAPI. The similarity is so great, that there is almost a one for one class with identically used methods, though possibly renamed, in most cases for the core AtheOS API still left in Syllable.

Kurt never claimed that he didn't read the BeBook. The high level API's are very clearly inspired by BeOS and AFS was written after Kurt had read Practical Filesystem Design; written by the same man who wrote BeFS.

But none of that means that the very first versions of AtheOS (In fact it would have been named AltOS this far back) were started and perhaps even running before the BeBox was shipped. Kurt was working on AtheOS for a very long time before he even made the first public release, and we know that the GUI was re-written at least once in that time. The previous GUI was written in C and would have been nothing like the Be API.

I hope Syllable implements a beos emulation layer like cygwin and there is a healthy bidirectional interaction between Haiku/Syllable. They both fight for the same goal. And they should help each other.

No. Syllable is a fork of the AtheOS operating system, originally written by Kurt Skauen. Kurt never intended to copy the BeOS API, in fact AtheOS development started before the first BeBox was shipped. The BeOS API is undoubtedly a good design though. The Syllable API does use a lot of good ideas from the BeOS API, but we also design and add our own classes.

"The Syllable project dates back to July 2002, but the story begins well before that.

The history of Syllable really begins with an operating system named BeOS, which was developed throughout the 1990's by a small company named Be made up primarily of former Apple employees who were dissatisfied with the direction of Apple. They developed BeOS as a modern, powerful speed demon of an operating system that was particularly suited for heavy multimedia applications (you should have seen a BeOS machine running thirty simultaneous videos, smooth as butter).

Though Be was eventually bought out by Palm and BeOS was liquidated, it inspired a young programmer named Kurt Skauen in his efforts to create a hobby operating system. In the late 90's and early 00's, he created AtheOS, borrowing heavily from BeOS' file system and programming API."

Yeah, it's badly phrased. At the time that was written Syllable was generally compared with other OSes like SkyOS, AROS, ReactOS and other smaller OSes. Many of those OSes are not POSIX compliant, so we consider it an advantage. You should also remember that a lot of the stuff in SUB is old, and as it has only just been placed back online, it's also currently unmaintained.

We really need to sort all of our documentation and things like FAQs together into a common format that we can maintain, but we just don't have the time. It would take me a month even if I was doing nothing else. But I might push it up my Todo list and try to get some of it into a sensible state.

Not yet, but I am planing to add a user-space USB API and it will probably end up emulating the libusb API for compatability with existing software. I'm waiting for the libusb2 API to settle down a little so I don't end up having to re-implement it all in 12 months time.

The Syllable team members are claiming that this OS should become a desktop os for everyday use.
But it doesn't run on newer hardware like my compaq notebook.

I'm not talking about that Syllable should have drivers for every new hardware. I'm talking about to fall back on simple VESA video modes or harddrive drivers that work out of the box.

Syllable does fall back to VESA drivers if it can't find a suitable display driver, but that's not a magical solution to all compatability problems. PC hardware is incredibly diverse and often times quirky so it can be quite difficult to provide even a decent "failsafe" configuration. Also, like all software Syllable is not without bugs.

FreeDOS has a much easier problem to solve in regards to working on all common x86 hardware. DOS is a 16-bit OS that in many places is just a thin wrapper for the standard BIOS calls. Syllable does much more and as such achieving full compatibility is a lot more challenging. That said, it is something that is being worked on.

It should run on your Compaq notebook. If it doesn't, there is almost certainly a specific bug that needs to be fixed. Have you checked our bug tracker and reported your problem? That's really the only way they'll get fixed, because otherwise we wont know about them!

If you want that Syllable is taken serious it should at least run on every hardware.

You make it sound so simple.

Syllable does support a very wide range of hardware and generally does work on new but not bleeding-edge hardware. For example I have an Intel 945G system under my desk at the moment. 90% of the hardware on it is supported with specific drivers in Syllable, including the PCI-E GeForceFX 7200, HDA audio and SATA controller. I wont deny there are some bugs, but I always try to fix them and update any drivers a I find them.

There are also some general bugs that a lot of people run in to:

o Syllable can not boot on systems with 2GB or more of memory.
o Some ATA bugs remain (And some are already fixed in CVS, so if you're having trouble here it may be fixed in a weekly development build)
o There are some ACPI and SMP bugs that remain to be fixed, but these are not that common.

I believe on balance that Syllable boots on more hardware than it fails on, and where it does boot the hardware is well supported. We'll fix the remaining issues as we go along, and more importantly, as we find them.